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The writing and voice acting in this blew me away. The static art is nice but it's partially nostalgia-based... the writing and VA/VA direction are just plain amazing, easily better than a large majority of AAA just on the basics like emoting and context recognition, never mind like philosophical themes
Really looking forward to it, Mark. I still listen to Primordia soundtrack quite often and plan to do a replay soon. I wish you made another game in this universe. Adventure or RPG.
Yeah, I'm still not sure breaking up the parts was the right call. Probably should've just released it all at once, but I was hoping that this would let readers mull it a little more as they went, while also giving Vic time to get the audio version wrapped up.
It's of course weird to hear someone else read your writing, but I think Tord Johnson did a cool job. Animation, music, and sound effects by Victor Pflug.
It's of course weird to hear someone else read your writing, but I think Tord Johnson did a cool job. Animation, music, and sound effects by Victor Pflug.
Alright, I *finally* got around to playing this game, and I quite liked it. And I'm insanely critical of adventure games, so that is saying something. I'll leave a few general comments in case they're of interest to you MRY.
- The story and lore were both very impressive, if a wee bit predictable on the story line side. The presentation and pacing was top-notch though. I liked the idea of humanism. The info console was also really interesting, even if it's driven me mad trying to find whatever hidden entries I'm missing.
- The graphics were mostly quite nice -- the character sprites clash with the BGs a bit, but this actually seemed to get better as the game went along for whatever reason. I'd love to see what you could do with a slightly more varied color palate as well.
- Great voice acting. Top-notch for an indie production.
- The music was never irritating, and set the mood well, which is all I really ask for from game music.
- Crispin occasionally became a bit grating -- comic relief is a small target to hit, so to speak. He certainly had his moments though.
- The puzzles, the puzzles... this was a slightly mixed bag for me. For the most part they were quite good, I particularly liked the info console puzzle towards the end. I do think that the game tended to be overly focused on inventory-based puzzles though, which I thought was a bit of a shame given the potential of a sci-fi world to have lots of weird and mysterious things to interact with that you might want to do more with than fry with a plasma torch. Of course, inventory-based puzzles are the staple of the genre, but more clever dialogue or environment based stuff would have been nice.
- The achievement system... I didn't have any problems with it in and of itself, but the way it was presented sort of gave spoilers to the possible solutions at the end, which would have been nice to figure out myself.
- The length of the game... I admit I was a little surprised when it came to an end so quickly. I have no issues with the length of the game or the quality of the denouement and ending, particularly for an indie production. I guess there was just so much depth to the lore that I expected it to go on longer. I suppose that should be taken as a compliment :D.
That's all. Thanks for the very fun game, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the future.
Thanks for the comments (and the compliments)! Your points are well taken; there are some explanations for some of the points (which I've set forth below, in case you're curious), but I'll be the first to admit that the game has a lot of rough edges!
The story and lore were both very impressive, if a wee bit predictable on the story line side.
Yeah . . . . The predictability is partly a flaw, but the story never was meant to be a giant mystery. I mean, maybe realizing that Horatio was
the ship
was meant to be a bit of a suprise, but for the most part, what I was shooting for was more the player being able to watch Horatio undergo the slow train-wreck of realization regarding
humanity and his own identity
from a privileged position of already knowing, or at least suspecting, what was coming. That said, I think the marketing of the game -- as being about revealing a mystery -- maybe created some bad expectations in this regard.
the character sprites clash with the BGs a bit, but this actually seemed to get better as the game went along for whatever reason
Two possibilities. If you're talking about the resolution issue (i.e., that the sprites can be higher res than the backgrounds), then that was unfortunately a "feature" of using the D3D driver, which is (per Wadjet Eye Games) necessary on post-XP computers. I actually think that gets worse rather than better as the game goes on because you have a few screens (like the train station interior) where Horatio's sprite is very small, and thus becomes far higher resolution than the background. If there's another clashing issue, my only guess is that it results from the sprites having been redone (and significantly improved) about 2/3 of the way through production. Perhaps the redone style matched the late-game background style simply because they were drawn closer together in time?
- Crispin occasionally became a bit grating -- comic relief is a small target to hit, so to speak.
Agreed. Some of his humor is clearly meant to be groan-inducing -- i.e., a kind of second-order humor where you're shaking your head at the annoying puns (e.g., "common denominator"). But some of the fourth-wall breaking stuff didn't really work, and some of the references (notoriously the 99 problems one) were just lame. I probably needed to take a step back and cut some of it out after I had some separation, but for the most part whenever we put in a snarky line for him, it just stayed in by dint of inertia.
I do think that the game tended to be overly focused on inventory-based puzzles though, which I thought was a bit of a shame given the potential of a sci-fi world to have lots of weird and mysterious things to interact with that you might want to do more with than fry with a plasma torch. Of course, inventory-based puzzles are the staple of the genre, but more clever dialogue or environment based stuff would have been nice.
Inventory puzzles, door code puzzles, and "cut things with the torch" probably are like, 90% of the puzzles in the game. There are a few reasons for that -- thematically I think they work pretty well, but mostly it was probably the much higher degree of difficulty of implementing other puzzle types and my lack of experience designing adventure game puzzles. I read quite a few articles on adventure game puzzle design, but I still probably didn't do a great job with them.
The achievement system... I didn't have any problems with it in and of itself, but the way it was presented sort of gave spoilers to the possible solutions at the end, which would have been nice to figure out myself.
I don't like the achievements, but the publisher insisted (reasonably so, on the ground that Steam players all but demand them; Steam has been by far our largest market). Not only do they spoil stuff (in part because the revisions to the names and achievement text that I sent over didn't all get put in), they also warp the way certain parts of the game (like the kiosk) operate. The idea behind the kiosk was that it was an optional way for players to delve deeper into the setting, not that it would be a "guess the word the designer was thinking of" puzzle. Likewise, the "We're All In It Together" achievement turns a small way of tracking how the player solves puzzles (i.e., which robots show up at the end) into a gotta catch 'em all mechanic that results in people getting angry that they missed an achievement because they solved a puzzle in a seemingly innocuous way (e.g.,
using the decryption module on the bridge
). The only think that the achievements accomplish is alerting players to the existence of multiple endings, which I guess I'm glad about because otherwise it seems lots of people would've missed them altogether.
The length of the game... I admit I was a little surprised when it came to an end so quickly.
Yeah . . . . I will say that the change in pacing at the end was deliberate. From pretty early on, my view was that the finale of the game had to move quickly because the intensity of the situation (i.e.,
friends being killed and all
) was inconsistent with a slow-paced puzzle-solving, tinkering approach. Moreover, I wanted to capture in gameplay, to some extent
the way in which Horatio's pacifism and aspiration to build, rather than destroy had been undermined by the violence he was being subjected to. Thus, from Clarity's death on, the only puzzle solutions involve destroying or threatening to destroy things
.
But while the last part of the game may reflect some deliberate decisions, it also reflects a lack of polish and testing. It wasn't in place till fairly close to release, and I never really polished it the way I polished the rest of the game: essentially, the way I worked was that I would play the game from start until wherever I could get when I ran out of time (i.e., because I had to sleep, or take care of kids, or cook dinner, or whatever) and then send my list of bugfixes and (more importantly) polishing adjustments to the coder. He would then yell at me for sending him a 100+ item action list, and would then miraculously implement them all. As a consequence, I probably played through and polished the Dunes dozens if not hundreds of times.
We had a feature that let me skip to the start of Metropol, but that was as far as I could skip. As a consequence, the first parts of Metropol got really polished, but some of the late parts, I only played through once or twice. And some parts -- like the
187 vs. Scraper and Clarity vs. Scraper
scenes, I actually never saw implemented until after the game shipped. They got put in late, and there were so many other things I had to do -- reviewing beta testers' bug reports, passing on graphics requirements to Vic, listening to VO, etc. -- that I neglected to give the game a closer look through. Due to a miscommunication with WEG, I also thought I had a couple more days to test and polish before code lock, so my intended 48 hours of playing through the game turned out to be 0 hours.
I also think that because the later parts of the game only got to the testers fairly late in the process, they were never gonna say "you need to add another hour's worth of gameplay"; it wouldn't have been feasible even if they'd asked for it. Victor did have the idea of adding another screen to just space out Metropol a bit (and he even drew and animated it) but integrating at that point was too hard. (It was going to be a cable car that sat between Main Street and the Tower exterior.) So, that's all to say: part of the reason to end feels rushed is deliberate, but part of it is just rookie mistakes on my part and the (reasonable) desire of WEG to get the game shipped on a fixed date, rather than letting it slip indefinitely until "when it's done." (Left to my own devices, I would've probably spent three more months polishing Metropol; I doubt anyone else on the team could've put up with me for that long.)
I guess there was just so much depth to the lore that I expected it to go on longer.
As Pocahontas says, "I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name"! I guess my feeling is that the lore should always suggest more to the world than there is for the player to explore. Perhaps the ratio was too far off in Primordia, though. One problem may have been that some of the stuff mentioned in passing (like the cathedral or rocket launch pads) sound cooler than the stuff you actually get to see in game.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, which is always useful for a novice developer to hear!
Horatio undergo the slow train-wreck of realization regarding
humanity and his own identity
from a privileged position of already knowing, or at least suspecting, what was coming. That said, I think the marketing of the game -- as being about revealing a mystery -- maybe created some bad expectations in this regard.
Well, I didn't see any of the marketing about the game, but I was referring to the 'reveal' being something of a genre trope, yeah. I guess I liked the air of mystery that surrounded things at the beginning and would have actually been happy with a little ambiguity. Reasonably that probably wasn't an option though.
Two possibilities. If you're talking about the resolution issue (i.e., that the sprites can be higher res than the backgrounds), then that was unfortunately a "feature" of using the D3D driver, which is (per Wadjet Eye Games) necessary on post-XP computers. I actually think that gets worse rather than better as the game goes on because you have a few screens (like the train station interior) where Horatio's sprite is very small, and thus becomes far higher resolution than the background. If there's another clashing issue, my only guess is that it results from the sprites having been redone (and significantly improved) about 2/3 of the way through production. Perhaps the redone style matched the late-game background style simply because they were drawn closer together in time?
The main instance I was thinking of was Scraper's sprite, particularly in the introduction.
His sprite in the final scene of the game looked quite a bit better.
Agreed. Some of his humor is clearly meant to be groan-inducing -- i.e., a kind of second-order humor where you're shaking your head at the annoying puns (e.g., "common denominator"). But some of the fourth-wall breaking stuff didn't really work, and some of the references (notoriously the 99 problems one) were just lame. I probably needed to take a step back and cut some of it out after I had some separation, but for the most part whenever we put in a snarky line for him, it just stayed in by dint of inertia.
I think it was more the fact that basically 100% of his lines were trying to be funny, so that although it hit the mark many times, it made the instances where it didn't stand out.
Inventory puzzles, door code puzzles, and "cut things with the torch" probably are like, 90% of the puzzles in the game. There are a few reasons for that -- thematically I think they work pretty well, but mostly it was probably the much higher degree of difficulty of implementing other puzzle types and my lack of experience designing adventure game puzzles. I read quite a few articles on adventure game puzzle design, but I still probably didn't do a great job with them.
This is fair, though I think you're underselling yourself a little bit. Though I do think making puzzles 'thematic' is a danger. I can understand the themes of revealing hidden things, building and destruction, etc. but I'm of the opinion that while it can be cool to tie gameplay into overarching narrative themes, it shouldn't be a restriction on the gameplay itself. I can certainly understand the difficulties of creating good adventure game puzzles though -- many professionals fail miserably, and really there's no substitute for experience. Still, I hope you don't take it as my saying that the puzzles were poorly done -- not the case. I just thought they could have used a bit more variety.
The idea behind the kiosk was that it was an optional way for players to delve deeper into the setting, not that it would be a "guess the word the designer was thinking of" puzzle.
Truly, it brought back feelings from the early days of Sierra parser games that I'd thought long buried.
The only think that the achievements accomplish is alerting players to the existence of multiple endings, which I guess I'm glad about because otherwise it seems lots of people would've missed them altogether.
Funny, that was the only real problem I had with them. I thought the existence of an obvious choice was a pretty good indication of multiple possible endings.
Yeah . . . . I will say that the change in pacing at the end was deliberate. From pretty early on, my view was that the finale of the game had to move quickly because the intensity of the situation (i.e.,
friends being killed and all
) was inconsistent with a slow-paced puzzle-solving, tinkering approach. Moreover, I wanted to capture in gameplay, to some extent
the way in which Horatio's pacifism and aspiration to build, rather than destroy had been undermined by the violence he was being subjected to. Thus, from Clarity's death on, the only puzzle solutions involve destroying or threatening to destroy things
I understand and agree with the pacing (though I don't *necessarily* agree with the thematic nature of the puzzles, as I described previously, although I can understand the decision).
But while the last part of the game may reflect some deliberate decisions, it also reflects a lack of polish and testing. It wasn't in place till fairly close to release, and I never really polished it the way I polished the rest of the game: essentially, the way I worked was that I would play the game from start until wherever I could get when I ran out of time (i.e., because I had to sleep, or take care of kids, or cook dinner, or whatever) and then send my list of bugfixes and (more importantly) polishing adjustments to the coder. He would then yell at me for sending him a 100+ item action list, and would then miraculously implement them all. As a consequence, I probably played through and polished the Dunes dozens if not hundreds of times.
We had a feature that let me skip to the start of Metropol, but that was as far as I could skip. As a consequence, the first parts of Metropol got really polished, but some of the late parts, I only played through once or twice. And some parts -- like the
187 vs. Scraper and Clarity vs. Scraper
scenes, I actually never saw implemented until after the game shipped. They got put in late, and there were so many other things I had to do -- reviewing beta testers' bug reports, passing on graphics requirements to Vic, listening to VO, etc. -- that I neglected to give the game a closer look through. Due to a miscommunication with WEG, I also thought I had a couple more days to test and polish before code lock, so my intended 48 hours of playing through the game turned out to be 0 hours.
I also think that because the later parts of the game only got to the testers fairly late in the process, they were never gonna say "you need to add another hour's worth of gameplay"; it wouldn't have been feasible even if they'd asked for it. Victor did have the idea of adding another screen to just space out Metropol a bit (and he even drew and animated it) but integrating at that point was too hard. (It was going to be a cable car that sat between Main Street and the Tower exterior.) So, that's all to say: part of the reason to end feels rushed is deliberate, but part of it is just rookie mistakes on my part and the (reasonable) desire of WEG to get the game shipped on a fixed date, rather than letting it slip indefinitely until "when it's done." (Left to my own devices, I would've probably spent three more months polishing Metropol; I doubt anyone else on the team could've put up with me for that long.)
That's an interesting post-mortem. To be honest I never really felt that the game was suffering from a lack of polish at any point, though I suppose the 'flavor' descriptions and characters and such were starting to get a bit sparse towards the end.
As Pocahontas says, "I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name"! I guess my feeling is that the lore should always suggest more to the world than there is for the player to explore. Perhaps the ratio was too far off in Primordia, though. One problem may have been that some of the stuff mentioned in passing (like the cathedral or rocket launch pads) sound cooler than the stuff you actually get to see in game.
Well, it's that versus Chekhov's Gun. I agree about the lore suggesting more depth to the world than the player gets to see, but I guess when certain things are referenced a lot and never appear (while other similar entities do, if only briefly) it feels a bit odd in a narrative sense.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, which is always useful for a novice developer to hear!
Funny, that was the only real problem I had with them. I thought the existence of an obvious choice was a pretty good indication of multiple possible endings.
An outrageously large number (granted, possibly we're talking single or low double digits) of people commented on forums or on Twitter about their frustration with the ending (singular) being inadequate because, for example, there was no way to save your friends or fix the ship, or Horatio automatically died at the end, or something like that. It's a bit like how the Gamespy review damned the game for the impossible "yet mandatory" kiosk puzzle, which was not mandatory, or how people complained about dead ends that didn't exist. I think a lot of players respond to bad things in a game not by thinking that there's more that they're missing but by assuming they've been shafted by the developer.
"destroyer"; "I'm a floating bomb"; "I hate that city, it's in my core logic"; "five megacycles"; etc.
we had so many C. guns going off that we didn't need any more! That said, I'm not sure there were that many completely gratuitous lore references -- maybe Civitas? But most of the references were relevant for setting up the guys who give you the
"destroyer"; "I'm a floating bomb"; "I hate that city, it's in my core logic"; "five megacycles"; etc.
we had so many C. guns going off that we didn't need any more! That said, I'm not sure there were that many completely gratuitous lore references -- maybe Civitas? But most of the references were relevant for setting up the guys who give you the
Yeah, that's the main omission. It might've made for a neat quest and a way to stretch out the rather easy
get the Gospel, use it on Leopold
means of getting that part of the Council Code, which is totally out of whack with the kiosk and the Factor sequence in terms of complexity. Ah well. Maybe a DLC!
DLC? Surely you mean visceral Primordia: Origins re-imagination as a Diablo-like hack'n'slash taking place entirely in Steeple's Cathedral, with many mini-bosses and QTEs
, he made excellent Wasteland LP.
